Zombie vs Sheep by Studio Radiolaris is an arcade-style shooter that reminds me of a puppet show slash shooting gallery on carnivals. And just like those mentioned, this is pretty fun for the most part.

Don’t be fooled by the name, Zombies vs a lone harmless sheep? How could a sheep beat the hell up hungry-for-human-brains zombies? It is actually you who is protecting the sheep from hordes of zombies and other creepy creatures like phoenixes, bats, worms, spiders and whatnot.

The game has two gameplay modes, Campaign and Survival, the latter being a self-explanatory. The campaign consists of 6 stages. Each one is lengthy enough and has bosses. You can select which stage to replay after unlocking them.

The game actually uses pretty much everything the iPhone has – tilt, shake, and touch.You tilt your device to move your sheep left and right, avoiding fireballs and other obstacles. Shaking the device reloads your weapon but you can also tap the reload button on the tap-left corner when you feel awkward shaking your iPhone. Tapping anywhere on the screen will shoot your current weapon. You can use three different weapon but the default one is the shotgun. Along the way you’ll encounter either an AK-47 or a flamethrower but their limited in use and if the ammo is depleted, you’ll revert back to your shotgun which is fine actually because flamethrower does more harm than any good. You’ll set the zombies in flame but their heads will become a fireball falling down on you. I don’t really use that weapon.

I really like the feature that you can upgrade something on this game. When you shoot an enemy, they will drop coins, obviously you’re going to collect them because the’re gold coins, who would ignore such eye-catching treasures dropping from creatures? That makes shooting even more fun, right? You spend those coins to uprade your sheep’s speed movement, increasing your ammo count, number of lives, dynamite ignition time, and the last one for the coins.

Graphics and sund is what really stands out in this game. It uses a cut-out effect and it really looks good. I really like it. They nailed it. The music is fun to listen to and never gets tiring.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this is a fairly fun game but there’s some issues. Number one is local highscores not being saved in the game. I was fun to know it uses Openfeint for submitting your highscores online but the game doesn’t even save your score. Maybe it does? Just pay the game while your wifi is on? That’s still a big letdown. The other problem is loading times. They’re quite long and the game looks like it loads on every page I wanna be in. What’s more unforgiving is there is a long, yes, a long loading time when you pause the game. And when you unpause? Loading time again. That kills it for me. I hope they manage to get a loop around that issue.

I still had fun even though it frustrates me with those issues mentioned above. For me they’re not minor issues, they’re actually big deal. Graphics, music, and engaging gameplay is what really saved this game to be really unforgiving to play. I’s not something I get back to again and again but I still play it once in a while.